E-Finance Lab Spring Conference 2012

Cloud Computing in the Financial Industry - A Security and Compliance Nightmare?

Over the past few decades, the spread of IT (Information Technology) has substantially altered the financial industry and enabled the development of a wide range of novel products, such as online banking or, more recently, mobile banking. Nowadays, IT has grown into one of the essential production factors in the finance domain. At the same time, IT constitutes a major expense post for the industry and suffers from the fact that many systems have grown more or less unstructured over a long period of time, resulting in low efficiency and flexibility.

Recently, cloud computing has emerged as a novel paradigm that suggests a groundbreaking shift in the way IT services are provisioned and consumed. Through consequent service orientation and the exploitation of economies of scale, cloud computing promises to deliver IT capacities both more flexibly and cost-efficiently than traditional in-house IT. However, moving applications and data into the cloud does not only suggest multiple benefits, but also poses novel challenges. Will the dream of low-cost, flexible computing become a security and compliance nightmare for the highly regulated financial industry, in the long run?

Further information about the conference, including a detailed agenda, and the option to register free of charge are available online at http://www.efinancelab.de/events/conferences/spring-conference-2012/.